ABSTRACT
English historians were among the pioneers of population history, and by the 1980s and 1990s they had produced syntheses of considerable statistical sophistication. Nevertheless, they never thought to identify baptised newborns by sex or by social class. What remains of the great Cambridge database is useless for our purposes. English infanticide studies to this day still focus on criminal archives and on single mothers. The parish registers, where they are extant, are more cursory than those of the Catholic Church.
